On Sat, Mar 15, 2008, mouss wrote:
Jeff Larsen wrote:
Taking a different approach than others...
Load them back into Outlook Express on a Windows box. Open a gmail account and enable it for IMAP access. Configure Outlook Express for gmail/IMAP and copy the messages to gmail folders. Configure T-Bird on CentOS for gmail/IMAP and copy from gmail to Local Folders. Hopefully you don't have several Gigs of messages. If you already have an IMAP enabled mail account somewhere else, you could use that too.
no need for gmail if he has a machine that can run an imap server (dovecot, courier, ...), as this would be faster.
and yes, if the mailbox is large, that'll take a loooooong time. I don't know which outlook* variants can copy multiple folders at once. Last time I had to do this, I needed to copy folders one at a time and when I reached the last folder, I left the machine for one day... (that was with some outlook 200?).
My normal method of getting mail from an Exchange or other IMAP server to a local Maildir store is with a python script that logs into the remote IMAP server, queries for all the folders, then copies all the messages to the local Maildir (which is usually served by courier-map).
We *STRONGLY* recommend that people leave their mail on the IMAP server, not on their desktop machines as (a) it's on a reliable server, not the Microsoft Virus Windows, (b) it's easy to move to a new desktop machine with minimal hassle, and (c) it's available via webmail or remote secure IMAP when away from the desk.
Over the years I've written scripts to convert from a variety of mail stores to Maildir including standard Unix mail files, U.W. IMAP binary mbx format, kmail, etc.
As I remember the original posting was talking about mail stored in Microsoft's proprietary binary format, I think the same one used by Access and Exchange servers. I have never tackled recovering data from these formats, and Friends don't let Friends do Windows.
Bill -- INTERNET: bill@celestial.com Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC URL: http://www.celestial.com/ PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way FAX: (206) 232-9186 Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820; (206) 236-1676
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